Jacob C. Singer

Check out more pictures from Riot Fest Chicago 2014 at Anobium:

http://anobiumlit.com/2014/09/07/riot-fest-chicago-2014-friday/

http://anobiumlit.com/2014/09/07/riot-fest-chicago-2014-saturday-nsfw/

The first time I saw a Sam Rosenthal painting was in an antique furniture store. The painting was called “Noble Square”—a depiction of a brilliant wet and snowy night at the corner of Division and Ashland in Chicago. The canvas overwhelmed me with its size and beauty. It was four feet tall by twelve feet across. The road glimmered with reflected light from the streetlamps, and with the exception of one white car, the image was devoid of humans. I asked the store manager about the painting and the painter. Why had I never heard of him, and why was there so little about him on the internet?

  One month later, I had the opportunity to interview Sam. He invited me to meet him at Whole Foods on Roosevelt, where we talked for an hour before I watched him paint the railroad tracks on the south side of the Roosevelt Bridge.

  As Sam worked, people approached him and his work. A bicyclist stopped, looked at the canvas, and paid his compliments. A hairstylist wanted to know if she could buy one of his pieces for her shop; they exchanged cards. Sam made small talk with everyone, and was very polite. I felt privileged to watch a unique moment between the artist and his audience, an unexpected audience that stumbles into a “studio,” and finds a piece of museum-quality work being completed. –Jacob Singer 

The Handshake: When did you want to become an artist?

Sam Rosenthal: In fifth grade I got the Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head and Figure, which taught me how to draw eyes and noses, so I could create my own comics. The following summer I started taking the train down to the Art Institute for courses.  In high school many of my classmates were getting into various drugs, and I figured, “If you can’t join them, beat them!” So I decided that I would be the best painter at school.  And by my senior year I was the best, well if not “the best,” at least I was “one of the best.”  [Later Sam told me he went to school with David Eggers and Vince Vaughn.]     

            Between my junior and senior year, I found out about the American Academy of Art, which was a really good school for impressionistic-realism and illustration, which is what I thought I wanted to do. So in 1987, I took a Saturday class, and it turned out about half of the students there were the best artists at their high school. I was humbled but it also made me work harder.

HS: I’m interested in your time in art school. What did you learn as a student? What can be taught to a student about painting? 

SR: My mom said I had to go to college for at least two years, so I went to Washington University in Saint Louis and was an art major for about two weeks. My professors told me to draw happy lines, angry lines, sad lines, and a bunch of worthless stuff. I knew that it would be worse to develop bad habits than do nothing, so I ended up getting a liberal arts degree in Sociology. But that whole time I was sketching. I used the library a lot—not only to cram for exams but to study art and artists.  I ended up graduating in two-and-a-half years.

            College art programs are all into the creative spirit and not into learning and applying craft. Basically, they believe that practical information inhibits creativity which is ridiculous. You can’t learn to write if you don’t learn to form sentences and paragraphs. It can’t just be theorizing about painting. You really need practical skills.  Ability inspires and facilitates creativity. 

            That’s why I returned to the American Academy in ’90, but the school was no longer so great. Many of the good students had gone through and were going to the Palette and Chisel. So while I was at the Academy, I was also spending about nine hours a day at Palette. They had live models for six to nine hours a day, and it cost around $240 a year, which was an amazing deal. At that time, Richard Schmid, who had a strong following, and his protégés told me to study at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut. So for two years I studied drawing anatomy, sculpture, and painting at Lyme. By then, I was painting everything—landscapes, still lifes, anything I saw would be recreated on canvas.

            From there I went to the Bougie Studio in Minneapolis. There I did a bust of Homer that took about 200 hours to complete. You really pushed yourself further than you could have anywhere else. You really learned how to train your eye and hand. You realized that you could always take it further. It’s never perfect.

HS: Do you believe talent is overrated?

SR: There is a whole field opening up because of K. Anders Ericsson’s research on the development of talent and expertise. They all take a lot of his research that suggests that you just have to put in these hours of extremely focused and directed learning. It’s training your hand and eye—when you do that you’re learning to see like an artist. As I kept developing, I could copy nature, but that wouldn’t necessarily make a good painting.

HS: When you were still a student what artists inspired you the most? Were there any shows that dramatically influenced you?

SR: In 1987 I went to a John Singer Sargent show at The Art Institute of Chicago. That was a huge influence on me. A couple years later there was a Joaquín Sorolla show.  He’s probably the best painter at capturing sunlight.

HS: How much did the other creative arts influence you? Were there any musicians or writers who influenced you, motivated you?

SR: I was focused only on painting, not even other visual arts. I listen to music. It’s great—it gets me through the day, but I don’t try to paint music or anything like that.  I might see something visually interesting in a movie and try to incorporate it into a painting, but that’s it.  

HS: Can you tell me more about what you mean by learning to see like an artist?

SR: Look at what I’m going to do later tonight—I have to subordinate all these values, like the scale from light to dark. I need to take all these parts and put them into a whole. If I get the parts correct, you might pat me on the head and say nice job, but it won’t necessarily be a great work of art. I’ve had to learn how to take those pieces and subordinate them into a unified whole. You have to internalize it. For example, when I look at realistic paintings I can date them within fifty years of when they were painted. And now we all see nature differently because of photography. The way leaves flutter and how a camera captures that on a two-dimensional surface. I can see that in the proportions of a photograph.

A lot of practical information died with Modern art. It’s an extreme case of Emperor’s New Clothes where people will say they like Picasso but less than one percent of people actually like his work. They just say they like it because they don’t want to sound like philistines. At what level do they like him? People think he had his Blue Period because he was sad. Wow, that’s a deep thought; that must have taken a lot of thinking. Standards are important, and I’m not trying to tell people what to like. I don’t know if standards should be set in stone. It’s all interpretive. But with no standards, nothing is good. What I’m saying is that by going to these different academies I received a classical education in art.

HS: It seems that part of your education was working within a community, then working in solitude. What are the pros and cons of both environments?

SR: There was something nice about the isolation in New Hampshire where I was really able to work on my painting. During that time, I would only see people when I went to the grocery store. Those were the only people I’d see for weeks at a time. You advance a lot, but life catches up with you, and you start to feel awful. The isolation can become overwhelming and make you crave the pace of city life.

            It’s good to be around other people. Working as an island can make it difficult to objectively see your pieces. On the other hand, I see people who are all part of a cult-like group of artists.  Sometimes the dogma that everyone follows makes people timid, and it’s not the leader as much as the disciples. The followers are usually more dogmatic. They’re the ones who narrow down ideas, standards, and potentialities.

  HS: Is that why you moved around so much?

SR: Absolutely. Every place is very idiosyncratic, which is fine as long as you don’t get too sucked in, and each place gave me something different. All the different criticism and teachers, you take it all in. Some you might respect, others you might not. I had one teacher who was always really critical of my work, and he would repeat himself. Then I began to see a pattern in his feedback. That was his ideal.  It’s important as a student to be able to see that ideology in your teachers and learn from them—that’s part of the learning process. You have to learn how to take all this feedback and sift through it, which is difficult. You’re going to suffer a bit, but if you come out the other side, you will be way better as an artist.     

No one is starting from scratch. Before someone picks up the brush for the first time he’s already seen a lot of art. I forgot who originally said this, but “the self-taught artist has an ignorant teacher.”

HS: When do you think you became a professional artist or at least started creating professional-quality work?

SR: While I was at Bougie, I got into my first gallery and sold my first painting. Then I moved back to Chicago and took a job at an animation studio painting cells. In late ’94, I traded a painting for a ticket to Australia where I painted my way across the country.  Then I moved to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. It was there that I started to consistently create professional-quality paintings. I was really isolated from everything, and I could just paint.

HS: How old were you then?

SR: Twenty-five.

HS: How do you choose your subject?  What do you think is the relationship between your subject matter and the audience? 

SR: The reality is I paint what appeals to me and what inspires me. On some level I’m always the first audience. People are always drawn to people in painting. If there is a human in a landscape, the eyes go straight to that figure. For example, if a nose is three inches too long that would look strange, yet if a branch is three feet too long, even an arborist isn’t going to notice it.

            The cityscapes can be the most tedious, because there are so many windows, and the perspective has to be pretty close to what’s going on. And a lot of the stuff I do is with an unreal perspective. I have to turn my head to see all the stuff and find a way to take those pieces and make visual sense of them.   

            I loved painting the landscapes in New Hampshire because it was beautiful, and I liked the scale. The Pacific Northwest was similar but a much bigger scale. I didn’t feel as comfortable. The White Mountains, right next to the Connecticut River, were ideal. It was a great place to paint.

            With Chicago, most people are busy going to or from work, or they are focused on the jerk who cut them off in traffic. Everyone knows it’s a beautiful city and is wowed by it. Generally, those adults who are wowed are tourists. So I try to paint with an insiders view but also with fresh eyes. Photographs of tourist destinations don’t make you empathetic, but I hope my paintings can help people to notice things that they see everyday in a new way. I’ve had people say, “I see that everyday but I never would have thought it was beautiful.”

HS: Do you think art makes humans more empathetic?

SR: It’s like you are loaning your eyes to someone, except you don’t see with your eyes, you see through them. There is a brain at work, even if you are trying to be objective with everything you see. It’s still going through a filter.

When people see me painting they say they say they like my work.  It runs the gamut from CEOs to the homeless, from cops to prostitutes.  My work really does seem to cut demographics—it’s accessible and easy to relate to.  I’m most happy about that while working.  

HS: When I saw “Noble Square” (48”x144”) at SG Grand I was awestruck by this large painting of the intersection at Division and Ashland with snow falling and pools of water on the road. Can you tell me about a bit about painting that piece?

SR: “Noble Square” is Pointillism on the top. I did a color study at night, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to see the canvas, and that photographs wouldn’t work either. At that time my daughter was very young, and the only time I could paint was at night. A friend of mine was talking about a painting that had no hard edges. But I do cityscapes! How can I do that? So I started to think about how to do this—nighttime where it’s snowing. That way there are very few hard edges. Pointillism, which I used on the top, created the illusion of snow falling in front of streetlights. The piece segues into a regular painting where there are puddles in salted streets.

            When I was landscape painting in New Hampshire, I stayed on a farm and was doing a number of sunsets. The owner of the farm had worked in Boston for most of his life but retired to his family farm in New Hampshire. And he would always tell his friends in Boston how beautiful the sunsets were, but he could never capture that specific light in a photograph. “But you got it,” he told me. That felt good. That’s how I knew I was making progress. 

HS: Can you tell me a moment where you were awestruck by someone’s painting?

SR: Richard Schmid did this painting called “Victorian Winter,” and my girlfriend at the time took me to this poster shop in St. Louis to look at a print she liked, not knowing that I knew the painter. It was of a stately Victorian house sitting amid a crest-fallen snow. I grew up in cold Chicago, getting my face pushed in the snow and listening to songs like “Winter Wonderland,” but I never really understood those songs. Suddenly I saw this beautiful painting, and it felt like the blinders were taken off. Schmid did that for me. 

HS: When did you start using larger canvases? 

SR: It first started about five years ago with “Twilight on Wacker Drive” (84”x72”). That was the first painting where I needed to use a U-Haul to transport the canvas. A friend of mine who runs a gallery said that the bigger paintings are usually considered more important to people, and one of my models said that she liked the bigger ones because it felt like you can walk inside them. Larger canvases provide a much bigger space so I have more opportunity to create and differentiate my work.  

HS: Can you tell me about using a U-Haul to set up? Is that difficult?

SR: It’s a pain in the butt. It’s expensive to rent a U-Haul. A piece is pretty well developed before I take it out. I will work on smaller versions and sometimes go to location simply to take notes.

HS: Some of your pieces have a bit of narrative tension. There is one picture with a couple that may or may not be holding hands. Was that staged or something you found by chance? How do you edit the content of your pictures?

SM: In that painting, both subjects have their hands in their pockets, but they’re not touching. As for whether it was set up, there was a guy there and I painted him. I asked the guy who usually holds my canvas if he could get a girl and they could stand in as models. I could’ve had them embracing but didn’t. You don’t know what kind of intimacy they have. I wanted to keep it vague. 

HS: There is a focus to your paintings. They’re never as cluttered as real life. Do you edit out things like garbage or people in the periphery?

SR: Some of my paintings are partly staged. I’m trying to do anything that serves the painting. I’m not sugarcoating the city by covering up garbage, but I don’t exclusively focus on garbage or the dark side of city life. If I made it too clean I don’t think that would serve the painting either. But do you really see cigarette butts a block away? With the scale that I’m dealing with, the eye doesn’t naturally focus on those smaller things. A lot of people think you are being more honest if you focus on just the negative but I don’t think that’s anymore honest then focusing prohibitively on the positive. I try to show paint peeling, rust, or weather. I’m not trying to do utopian propaganda paintings for Chicago. That wouldn’t be as authentic or attractive. It would be too sterile. 

HS: Do you make your living through sales of original pieces or commissions?

SR: It’s a mixed bag. There is a lot of word of mouth for both commissions and sales. I like doing commissions because of the collaborative process that exists between me and the client. There is also a sense of employment that provides security, if only for a period of time. In between commissions, I work and create independently.  I have been fortunate to have a lot of good clients.

I had one client who wanted me to paint her dog. I’d never done that before and wanted to figure out a composition that would be interesting in order to make the whole thing work. The dog was well behaved, and they were great and really understanding. 

HS: It seems that commissions have allowed you the opportunity to work on your terms, to create pieces that you like, and to make a living doing that. That has to be rewarding.

SR: I’ve found it more freeing to do commissions than to sell pieces at galleries. I’m not against galleries, but some won’t even look at my website. They’ll say my stuff is irrelevant, but people who see my things seems to like them. They seem relevant to people's lives. But they are irrelevant to a gallery’s scene or discussion. 

Sometimes painting my own works feels self-indulgent. I like the mix. I have had a lot of good clients. After all, art for art’s sake is a very modern thing. Throughout history most painters’ work consisted of commissions. I like doing commissions because with a good client it’s a collaboration. Those pieces make me stretch in ways that I haven’t stretched before or wouldn’t on my own. And I feel like I have employment.

One way to think about contemporary American music is to put pop music on one end of the spectrum and independent music on the other. Both are looking to reach a broad audience, but have very different ways of going about doing so. Musicians like Taylor Swift have a team of agents, lawyers, public relations gurus, professional backing musicians, and production assistants, all working for Taylor Swift. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Robert Steven Moore, America’s most prolific DIY musician. Since his first album, Phonography (1976), Moore has self-released over 400 albums, mostly distributed through his mail-order catalogue, and has made dozens of videos, now available on YouTube.

Moore started out in the thick of the Nashville music machine playing music with his father, a backing musician for Elvis Presley. He could have been a part of the pop machine, but he decided to do things differently. And now, at age fifty-nine, Moore is planning his first world tour. -Jacob Singer

  The Handshake: At age nine you were brought into the world of music. You grew up in Nashville. Your father was a session musician who played with Elvis Presley. Tell me about your musical influences as a child.

  R. Stevie Moore: It’s such a long story, so involved. On one level it’s so middle class and ordinary, and yet on the other hand we’re talking about a massive musical and cultural avalanche. With my father, we had a swimming pool and everything was amazing, but there was an abusive, distant relationship, which I don’t even want to get into. There was all this money but not a lot of human interaction. He played great hillbilly music, but I hated country music. All I cared about were hits and 45s.

  HS: Who were your influences?

  RSM: I was influenced by my age and my peer group. I was the perfect age in 1964 for when the Beatles exploded. I was a Beatles kid. And that means Hendrix, Zappa, and smoking pot…I was the perfect age for the Woodstock Generation. I had nothing to do with what was happening in Nashville, which was regimented hillbilly music. Now it blows my mind. It’s fantastic music, just like the blues. I was never into the blues. In the ‘70s I had no patience for what was happening in Nashville, which was Allman Brothers southern blues.  It was three, four chords only. I was following Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks, 10cc, Queen…I had to split. From then on I was DIY, which was pretty much what the Beatles were. They burst all the rules. They didn’t tolerate mediocrity.

  HS: Tell me about your first home studio. How did you build it?

  RSM: There’s never been a home studio. It was a simple matter of having a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the bedroom. I did it at home when I was living with my parents, in the basement, just like many kids in the ‘60s. Recording has never been more than tinkering with recorders. Back in the old days I had no multi-track, meaning I had a little stereo tape deck. And back and forth, bouncing, tape generation…5, 6, 7, or 8 passes until the first track sounds like static. Now everything’s digital—a mouse click. I’ve never had a home “studio.” It’s always just been pieces of equipment: little microphones, mixers, keyboard. I’ve used them all. I’ve lost some, gained some. But I’m not a techie person. I also have financial problems where I can’t just go out and blow money on upgraded compressors. I don’t even care. How good does it have to sound?

  HS: Are you recording now?

  RSM: I’ve recently started on the most important record of my entire career with money from my Kickstarter success, which happened two to three months ago. I raised eleven grand to record a brand new album. I will be doing that with a friend who has Pro Tools, which is great, even through it kind of works against my lo-fi philosophy. I don’t really have a set philosophy. It’s all or nothing at all. I don’t mind being very commercial and mainstream and being over produced. But I also love the lo-fi, off-the-cuff. Stop making all those edits.

  HS: After all these years, do you like having someone there to help you?

  RSM: I will always be known as the man who needs an editor, and I’ll totally agree with that. I’m a diary recordist. To me, everything I record is valid. I can’t pick and choose. I can’t think about which R. Stevie Moore fan will like this piece or that piece. There are some people who love my most bizarre stuff. I can be profane. I love noise and the worst possible incorrect music. But on the other hand I have this talent for re-arranging Beach Boys and Beatles or whatever it is I do. I love it all.

  HS: Has it always been just you playing solo?

  RSM: I went through the whole rock combo thing. We were doing covers. I was in bands we played dances, sock hops. But that was the late ‘60s, and people were growing their hair out and experimenting with vices and getting in trouble and dropping out of school. I didn’t drop out of school, but I dropped out of college. I was a great high school student—graduated in 1970 and then went to Vanderbilt. It was way over my head with all these egghead, smart people from all over the country. I just didn’t care about it at that time. I’ve never been that good of a book learner.

  On the other hand, I have also had a well-honed talent for learning overdubs. All those one-man bands were major influences on me: Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Todd Rundgren. They came out with these albums where they played all these instruments. People ask if I became a one man band because I couldn’t find other musicians or because I didn’t like to play with other musicians. It’s all of the above. There’s no right or wrong. It’s a convenience factor. Go figure, Todd Rundgren sitting around all these instruments and equipment—much more expensive than anything I’ve ever had—he’s gonna make a record. It’s a no-brainer. That’s how it has been. It’s not because I didn’t like working with other musicians. I’ve done both, but I started as the alone-in-the-bedroom guy.

  HS: Tell me about your decision to move from Nashville to New Jersey. Did you know people there?

  RSM: I had to get out of Nashville. I split and came up to New Jersey, and I was twelve miles from the Lincoln Tunnel. I didn’t just go on my own, though. I could never do that. I had a job waiting for me at a Sam Goody record store. I had an uncle who was a long-time supporter of what I was doing, who helped me put together my first album, Phonography.

  The Talking Heads and the Ramones were exploding. I was never big on playing live in Nashville, never had my own band. There was a rumor that I had a band in high school called The Marlborough, but that was kind of a joke. They were just my buds. I was in bands, a lounge-rock band playing inns, but they were never R. Stevie Moore. I never had a band. Once I started making home recording around ’72 or ‘73 I was never out playing clubs, hanging, schmoozing on the street. I hated that. I’m a hermit. I have social problems with trying to mingle with the business. It didn’t matter. It was great to stay home.

  HS: What effect did the move have on your career?

  RSM: I moved in ’78. Besides the punk rock thing, I was also able to capitalize on the cassette revolution. I was right there for it and was able to make a little cottage industry of mail-order cassettes. I was putting out catalogues, because I couldn’t afford to advertise. I promoted it through the postage, long before the internet. I wasn’t making money, but I was making a name for myself. Everyone had a Walkman. It was a revolution. You could make your own album on a blank cassette. That’s what I was doing on reel-to-reels ten years earlier. When that happened, ’82 and ’83, it was perfect. I had huge fans. But I had lunatics. The thing which I craved was lunatics, because they’d build huge stacks of my cassettes. And they keep coming back, two more, two more, four more. It was amazing. That was a huge part of what made me me.

  HS: Do you think there is a relationship between your lack of commercial success and your desire to stay home?

  RSM: There’s just so much bullshit involved with trying to promote yourself face-to-face. I just never believed in it and maybe I was shooting myself in the foot. It goes back to what I was telling you earlier about my uncle Harry. He was telling me I had to get a band together. I said, “Well, it’s not that easy.” I jammed with some friends, but I couldn’t get a band together. That required so much disciple and organizational skills. I just didn’t have that.

It works both ways. I had to follow my muse—that’s the kind of person I am. So many people are out there to get all dolled up to sell themselves in the marketplace whether if it’s for sex, for a good job, a family, or backstabbing someone else. You have to be yourself. We’re not all out there to be on the red carpet and to impress. I just like to stay home. I have song about that. It’s just part of my personality. I’m a one-man band guy. Not to mention that there was no where to play in Nashville. All of that’s changed.  The whole country has changed since those days. Every town has an alternative scene.  It’s been generations of change.

  HS: How has the music scene changed for you? How has it evolved over the past couple years?

  RSM: I don’t really have an answer to that. I’m sick of the whining part of my shtick. It’s almost part of me in interviews. I’m always complaining “How did it get here? Britney Spears, what’s that all about?” I saw the Beatles. I saw Zappa and the real shit. I loved Nirvana. The teen thing will always happen. Every generation has them.

I’ve often been quoted as saying that if there was one single thing that caused the pure death of rock ‘n’ roll it was Madonna, bless her heart. Just the fact that the public ate that up—all style, no content. It’s all a dance floor. And I grew up with dance music too—Chubby Checkers doing the Twist. I can’t get into comparing. “Well my parents…your parents hate the music you like! And you hate the music they like.”  It’s all nonsense.

I love all music…Enrico Caruso, early Thomas Edison cylinders. C’mon, it’s all valid to me, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll. I’m a huge record collector. I’m a historian. I don’t have many barriers for what I don’t like. I can make fun of the Christina Aguileras and all that crap that’s happening…the American Idol mentality. But what are you gonna do?  Whine? Complain? Even the people in the underground, they say, “Why are you worrying about Britney Spears? That’s a whole ‘nother planet!” And they’re right. I don’t care about that stuff. It’s ridiculous. It’s slightly fascinating, the chaos of show business.

  There’s so much mediocrity. That’s been my main thing to complain about. There’s great and imaginative, creative efforts made in all genres of music, but on the other hand there’s a lot of crap in any of those genres. Everybody is so lazy, and the public eats it up. And I can’t blame them. I’ve always been one who looks for music with a twist, especially in rock. Nirvana blew me away. And their timing! Knocking Michael Jackson off the charts. Of course, that whole thing imploded. I loved Oasis, and I hated Oasis. I was a little into Radiohead, and then I gave up, but recently, they’re god-like. I’m going back and hearing these things Radiohead did that I’ve never heard before, and I’m loving it, even though his voice gets a little U2-ish. He’s a great crooner, but it’s the music behind him. It’s unbelievable. I also go way deep into electronica, drum and bass. I love experimental mash-up, DJ music…all of it.

  HS: It seems like you’re a person in love with the medium of music more so than a specific genre of music. Good music, good art fights the boredom of the world.

  RSM: I don’t feel like I’m alone in this. We’re all kind of this way. Who are we fooling? Why are we so into the latest trend? Lately I’ve been talking about how music parallels food. What did you have for dinner tonight? And if you have the means, you’re not going to want to eat the same thing tomorrow. You want variety. It has to be variety.

People will say, “What have you been listening to lately?” Do you mean this morning or two hours ago? It goes all over the map. It always has and it always will. I’ve got a million CDs in the next room, and this vinyl collection you’d die for, and I don’t know what to do with all my music. The variety, the diversity. We’re in the total minority, though, because the masses are asses, and it’s always been like that. People are following their peer groups. They’re told to like something and so they go out and buy it.

  HS: How would you describe your status as a DIY legend? Has the myth become bigger than your music?

  RSM: It’s been an uphill struggle, but the irony is that now things are really exploding with me as this old sage of DIY. How am I to reveal myself? I’ve been nervous about doing these interviews. Whatever. I’m down with it. I just wish I was twenty years younger. The disciples are all Ariel Pink fans. There’s a huge story there, a chapter which we couldn’t even get into because of time. Ariel has been a good buddy of mine for ten years. But there are a million R. Stevie Moores out there. They’re trying to get my approval and sending me their cassettes. Everyone wants me to put out cassettes again. You’re nuts! You’re crazy. It doesn’t sound that great and you have to have a tape player. I like all formats. I’m not an anti-MP3 guy or even anti-file sharing. People ask about how I feel about people sharing my music. I could care less, which is totally the wrong approach.

HS: Do you think you’ve been able to get a wider audience over the past ten years as a result of the internet?

  RSM: What do you think?

  HS: I think yes. Of course.

  RSM: It’s outrageous. And I work the internet. I’m embarrassed at how awful…I spend so much time on it, on Facebook. It’s self-hype. I’m promoting myself. Posting on SoundCloud because of all my many thousands of songs. Pay attention! Pay attention! That’s what it’s all about. After a while, it becomes embarrassing. I have to close everyone out of my life every once in a while in order to relax and hope that they discover me, but that’s not the way it goes. Everyone has such short attention spans. The competition is fierce. I hate having to compete with all these Guided by Voices people.

  The biggest joke over the years is me trying to get in touch with the Becks or the Frank Zappas or other important people, but it’s impossible because they’re celebrities. I saw the Kickstarter video for The Handshake which was brilliant, and there’s one part towards the end that says “Celebrity means nothing.” I feel like I’m the only person carrying the torch for this…whatever it is that I’m doing. And I happen to have a little talent to back it up.

I’m such a rebel. I have such an incredible rebelliousness and cultishness. People love cult heroes. That’s what I am pretty much. But I feel like my days are numbered. I wish I was in my thirties or forties instead, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve got a new band. There’s so much to talk about.

  HS: You’re going to hit the road, right?

  RSM: First tour ever. We’re still booking cities as we speak. I have to get a booking agent involved which is all brand new to me. I’m going to have to get into the professional arena. I hate that. Getting legal representation. I’ve been making some plane trips, and I never travel. I can barely get down to the corner store. The last thing I want to do is travel the country, but there’s such a demand right now. I could say, “No, not interested” and just stay home, but that’s ridiculous. Give me that guitar. I’m ready to go on stage.

  HS: Tell me about the band.

  RSM: This new band and this new direction has been put together by a guy making a documentary on me from New York named Jon Demiglio. He’s started out making a film and it dropped in his lap. He’s helping me finance. He’s become my manager. I have to be taken care of. I have special needs. I have an album called Special Needs. But that’s all cool. I’m not trying to cop out or hide behind any disabilities because I have something to offer. There’s a huge show I’m dying to do with poetry and spoken word. I want to be on Jimmy Fallon. It’s ridiculous. My ambitions are huge, but I’m also like Daniel Johnston, where I’m ready to explode at any moment.

The band is small and I’m playing bass as opposed to guitar, which I’m very pleased about. I’m more comfortable leading the band playing bass. It’s a keyboard, guitar, drummer, and me. And I got a new studio album coming. I’ve done remakes of old songs and some new ones. It’s real straight ahead, unlike the R. Stevie Moore craziness of other records. It’s got a lot of ELO influence and it’s fantastic. I can’t wait.  It’s called Advanced, and it’s going to be self-released sometime this summer. I don’t know how it’s going to be distributed. I’ve never been big on distribution. Maybe that’s my problem. Ariel Pink is going through some chaotic moments too. He hates the rock star machine. Did you hear about Coachella?

  HS: No.

  RSM: He recently played the festival, his biggest show of all time and he has a meltdown on stage—which is so perfect—and people freaked out. “What a joker! What a waste.  What a copout.” He’s had it with the machine, with what people expect you to do. He’s toured the world. He was on Jimmy Fallon. But our music is so much different. His music is a bit more limited. My music knows no bounds, and I want to keep it that way forever. I love home demos. I’m totally against the whole mentality of rock bands trying to perfect their music. I’m a sound painter. I’ve always loved those kinds of musicians. That’s what the ‘60s and ‘70s were all about. It wasn’t just music to dance to. Everyone used to love bootlegs.

HS: There’s something about the raw energy of a bootleg that hits you in a really good way.

  RSM: My whole life has been about capturing audio and video. I always try to have a camera rolling. So much great stuff has been captured. It’s just never enough. That’s always in the post-production. I’m even bad about putting together my most recent home tapes. It’s just too much work editing. I can’t sit and try to edit. I do my music. I’ll finish a song and put it on SoundCloud and forget about it until the next one. It’s a constant overflow of material. But you got to have that person who will say, “Okay, let’s make some sense out of all this.” And I’m all for that. I’m never hard to deal with. Present it anyway you want to present it, just don’t let it sit and collect dust.

  HS: There is an eight-disc anthology of cover songs recorded by an entire generation of musicians that look to you as a role model. There are people who do listen to you, who are inspired by you, and take you as a role model. Do you feel appreciated?

  RSM: Naturally, it’s a fantastic feeling. I had a bit to do with the anthology. It wasn’t totally out of my hands, this sickoftheradio.com project. It’s two people who got in touch with me, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll work with you on it and try to compile.” I was compiling it as stuff was flying in. As I was saying earlier, a guy needs an editor, and I was being the editor for the tribute project, which was great fun. I was pulling together the best submissions while listening to the worst ones: terrible, minimal, solos, amateurs. I love that stuff because it off sets the beauty of the produced stuff.

  Since then I have even put together a “Best Of” disc which consists of all the slick covers. The biggest thing of all that came from that was Jason Falkner, my new friend. His is probably the best. But he’s a legendary California musician from the ‘80s and ‘90s. He was in a band called Jellyfish. They were super. Huge power pop.

All these people are younger than me. That’s a major part of my success. They’re giving me honor that I’ve never had before. I’m turning into a geezer, but I still have this teenage head. It’s a very strange thing to talk about because I’m a basket case in a lot of ways: an alcoholic, a drug casualty. I’ve never understood finances, haven’t been able to support myself, but I’ve got my music. I have a lot to say. People are saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. Calm down. Relax.”  That’s what I need right now. I can’t get out and push myself to the top of the class without some help, and that’s okay.

  I don’t really enjoy anthologizing. It’s something I did to get it up off the ground and rolling. And of course there wasn’t a cent made from that. Which is funny. I was putting all this effort into something that was mainly just for the cause and not in order to pay my bills. It’s all about keeping your name on the front pages of the gossip columns. You want people talking about you. I just wanted to make sure that things don’t get lost.

  HS: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

  RSM: I just wanted to bring everyone up to the modern day. I got a band and we’re coming to Chicago to play. That’s outrageous and fantastic news for me. I want to play anywhere. Even the bad gigs, where there are only ten or fifteen people. And I want to go to Los Angeles. I have plans to record and tour with Ariel Pink and to meet up with Jason Falkner. There are already gigs booked for France and Prague. I’ve never been to the UK, and I’m playing London late this summer. I can’t wait. It’s fantastic. And hopefully I can bring back a little money to pay my bills, but if I don’t at least it will be about the exposure. The running joke lately is you need to go to Europe to live there because you would be an American legend in Europe…and gig anywhere you want and get paid top dollar. Europe is where you want to be. So let’s go, Jake.

HS: I’m down.